Eww, this website is all feely goody... Even in the article on money we get lots of talk of dreams and energies, who's supposed to use that in his thesis? And they praise things with the word "quantum leap". Don't they realize, that although quantum leap is non-linear, it's also really really tiny?

(03-10-2012 02:24 PM)Vosur Wrote: Please tell me more about how you dismiss the importance and validity of peer reviewed papers because they don't publish anything about your new age woo.

I don't, positively. When they actually say something on the topic, I take them seriously. I just don't make an assumption that anything ignored by journals must be inherently wrong.

(03-10-2012 02:24 PM)Vosur Wrote: If you don't have any credible source for the suggestion that there are other intelligent life forms within our own solar system or for the existence of "etheric levels of matter" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to be), don't even bother.

I judge credibility of sources also by personal experiences. If some sources independently describe my observations, then something is going on. This lends them credibility in my case, but not in yours. This is why we sometimes consider different sources credible. And that should be OK, as long as it's for my purposes. I do lots of things just for myself, not bothering to check them with the whole damn world if the world considers them rational enough.
I do what I can, to make sure these sources are internally consistent, non-contradictory with what we already know and possibly confirmed by some of our knowledge. That's the most I can do, unless science does it's part too.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

I do believe there is life outside this planet. However, because extra terrestrials may be more technologically advanced than us does not mean that they are automatically free from myth. Because I don't know any extra terrestrial life, I cannot come close to believing they are mythic thinkers or free of myth.

Maybe if these aliens come to our planet, why not, we may be so awed at their technoligical advances we will believe anything they have to offer or say about life.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

With the limited amount of information we have on intelligent life I guess they would be interested. Why? you may ask, well, we spend a lot of money and effort (not counting the emotional effort of hoping) trying to find organic MOLECULES! outside our planet, imagine if we find some bacteria or algae!!so all that stuff about "aliens won't care about us because we don't care about ants" thing is absurd, we don't care about ants because we know them, but we care about extraterrestrial life because we don't know it and we want to know it, why would it be different for aliens? (assuming they resemble our culture enough)

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

This is a repeat--don't know how this happened, and some of it is missing, sorry.

I do believe there is life outside this planet. However, because extra terrestrials may be more technologically advanced than us does not mean they are automatically free from myth. Because I don't know any extra terrestrial life, I cannot come close to believing they are mythic thinkers or free of myth.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

(04-10-2012 01:01 AM)Luminon Wrote: Eww, this website is all feely goody... Even in the article on money we get lots of talk of dreams and energies, who's supposed to use that in his thesis? And they praise things with the word "quantum leap". Don't they realize, that although quantum leap is non-linear, it's also really really tiny?

You do realize that this website was one of the sources you used, right?

(04-10-2012 01:01 AM)Luminon Wrote: I don't, positively. When they actually say something on the topic, I take them seriously. I just don't make an assumption that anything ignored by journals must be inherently wrong.

Neither do I. You seriously need to learn how to distinguish (new age) woo from potentially interesting scientific discoveries.

(04-10-2012 01:01 AM)Luminon Wrote: I judge credibility of sources also by personal experiences. If some sources independently describe my observations, then something is going on. This lends them credibility in my case, but not in yours. This is why we sometimes consider different sources credible. And that should be OK, as long as it's for my purposes. I do lots of things just for myself, not bothering to check them with the whole damn world if the world considers them rational enough.

In no way does personal experience make a source credible. Anecdotal experiences are neither reliable, nor are they useful as objective evidence. Using your method, one can delude himself into thinking anything to be true, because there will be other people sharing the same belief whose websites he can use as sources. As others have said before, you have a major confirmation bias. You pick and choose your sources so that they confirm what you already believe in. An example would be that there is extraterrestrial life in our solar system or that "etheric levels of matter" even exist.

(04-10-2012 01:01 AM)Luminon Wrote: I do what I can, to make sure these sources are internally consistent, non-contradictory with what we already know and possibly confirmed by some of our knowledge. That's the most I can do, unless science does it's part too.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

(04-10-2012 08:05 AM)Vosur Wrote: You do realize that this website was one of the sources you used, right?

What? I don't remember referencing any such website. I usually remember things. Show me the post please. It must have been like 3 AM or something Or did you dig up something on me from like 8 years ago?

(04-10-2012 08:05 AM)Vosur Wrote: In no way does personal experience make a source credible. Anecdotal experiences are neither reliable, nor are they useful as objective evidence. Using your method, one can delude himself into thinking anything to be true, because there will be other people sharing the same belief whose websites he can use as sources. As others have said before, you have a major confirmation bias. You pick and choose your sources so that they confirm what you already believe in. An example would be that there is extraterrestrial life in our solar system or that "etheric levels of matter" even exist.

Is that me explaining myself badly, or is that you vehemently trying to put me into a particular pigeonhole of muddy thinking? I use the method of Heron's beard and Occam's razor.

There's so many claims out there in the world, I wouldn't even know where to start believing first. So I don't. Personal experience shows me where to start collecting evidence. (mentally) The more evidence there is that makes sense with the rest, the more confident I am about the subject. And all evidence on a subject is carefully examined according to consistency, logic, contemporary science and personal experience. So I tend to have a lot of WIP subjects to which I ascribe various degrees of confidence and importance. To a careless bystander it may seem like a belief, but it isn't, it's a method of managing the ambiguous experience. I tend to have a lot of experience, so I need a method for managing it. I don't say everyone should do the same. Skeptics who only saw a couple of weird things in their life at most obviously don't need such a method.
But some of them might benefit from its essential element, the fine art of suspending your judgement and giving the observation a chance to show itself properly.

Show me. When and where, so I can apologize for such an embarrassing unawareness and try to remember what the hell was I doing, eating, drinking or smoking at the time, so I can avoid it. Otherwise it's your turn to apologize. And what did I exactly link from that website? They tend to publish absolutely all kinds of stuff with no discrimination, it's possible I googled for a particular article I saw elsewhere and tried to find it again. Although I usually check the websites too.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

(05-10-2012 11:53 AM)Luminon Wrote: Is that me explaining myself badly, or is that you vehemently trying to put me into a particular pigeonhole of muddy thinking? I use the method of Heron's beard and Occam's razor.

There's so many claims out there in the world, I wouldn't even know where to start believing first. So I don't. Personal experience shows me where to start collecting evidence. (mentally) The more evidence there is that makes sense with the rest, the more confident I am about the subject. And all evidence on a subject is carefully examined according to consistency, logic, contemporary science and personal experience. So I tend to have a lot of WIP subjects to which I ascribe various degrees of confidence and importance. To a careless bystander it may seem like a belief, but it isn't, it's a method of managing the ambiguous experience. I tend to have a lot of experience, so I need a method for managing it. I don't say everyone should do the same. Skeptics who only saw a couple of weird things in their life at most obviously don't need such a method.
But some of them might benefit from its essential element, the fine art of suspending your judgement and giving the observation a chance to show itself properly.

Again, your problem is that your judgment is highly biased due to the fact that you evaluate the validity of a source/claim (partly) based on unreliable anecdotal experiences. I think that what you fail to realize is that an objective approach helps a lot more in such cases. For example, I can confidently say that I can't think of anything that could have happened to you that could confirm that there is, to bring up the previously mentioned examples once more, alien life within our own solar system and that etheric levels of matter (you still haven't explained what that is supposed to be) exist. Can you?

That being said, you mentioned that the whole alien life thing is based on a certain source. Care to share it with me?

(05-10-2012 11:53 AM)Luminon Wrote: What? I don't remember referencing any such website. I usually remember things. Show me the post please. It must have been like 3 AM or something Or did you dig up something on me from like 8 years ago?

(05-10-2012 11:53 AM)Luminon Wrote: Show me. When and where, so I can apologize for such an embarrassing unawareness and try to remember what the hell was I doing, eating, drinking or smoking at the time, so I can avoid it. Otherwise it's your turn to apologize. And what did I exactly link from that website? They tend to publish absolutely all kinds of stuff with no discrimination, it's possible I googled for a particular article I saw elsewhere and tried to find it again. Although I usually check the websites too.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

(05-10-2012 01:14 PM)Vosur Wrote: Again, your problem is that your judgment is highly biased due to the fact that you evaluate the validity of a source/claim (partly) based on unreliable anecdotal experiences. I think that what you fail to realize is that an objective approach helps a lot more in such cases. For example, I can confidently say that I can't think of anything that could have happened to you that could confirm that there is, to bring up the previously mentioned examples once more, alien life within our own solar system and that etheric levels of matter (you still haven't explained what that is supposed to be) exist. Can you?

Well, there was a period of experiences for about a year that were quite intense and bizarre, I must say. The only luck is, that there wasn't any fear or sexual stuff involved No drugs, no alcohol, no meds, no life problems, nothing. Just me being a witness of some weird weird shit, many times actually.
Nothing directly involving space people, only confirming that their existence is principially possible. Plus of course my quite recent watchings of strange flying objects in the sky, without any obvious means of propulsion or flight. As far as I'm concerned, the ET story fits on my observations very well, so I keep it in mind and take it seriously. But nothing is set in stone.

As for the etheric matter, I thought I explained it thoroughly, multiple times. Etheric levels of matter are an umbrella term for a form of matter that is different, made of supersymmetric, weakly interacting massive particles, but otherwise very similar to our own. Similar in a sense that they too form a broad range of states of atomic matter and energy, from solid, liquid and gas equivalents to stellar plasma, galactic halos, CMBR and so on. Scientists can detect the superfluous CMBR, but not the atomic matter part (only indirectly, as dark matter). But as I posted in the other topic, the fringe science is already long time on the track of how this is relevant for our life.

(05-10-2012 01:14 PM)Vosur Wrote: That being said, you mentioned that the whole alien life thing is based on a certain source. Care to share it with me?

Yep. It's Benjamin Creme who writes and publishes in his magazine much materials on this topic, regularly for years. (besides political and economic stuff, that's the other half of all his message)

Basically, the story is that back in 2009 or 2010 Creme announced, that this great big glowing star-like UFO would appear in January or so, showing itself on the sky. This parade is a symbolic gesture, meant to inspire people into an attitude of wonder and expectance of great things to come, equivalent to the mythical Star of Betlehem. Looks like the positive attitude of masses is an important factor for him. Specially the poor religious world majority, we cynical westerners don't react that much.
The interesting thing is, from that moment there started videos on Youtube popping up, people filming this unusual object that was neither Venus nor Jupiter. An object that changed colors and shape, moved around, up and down and so on. The typical diamond or disc shape may be seen on many videos, photographs and even captured the attention of media.
Similarly, there started appearing the things that resemble a rocket either gone spinning into a spiral, or flying across the sky with a really broad plume. The first two were marked as a Russian missile and Australian rocket, but IIRC since then there were about six more of these all around the world, without any explanation.
Well, and this year I've been seeing about four of these silvery cigar tubes with no contrails nor wings.
We live in very interesting times, I must say. Signs in the sky, signs on the ground, it looks like someone's trying to appeal to the religious public by replicating their prophecies, that's my opinion. But it's about all religions at the same time plus a few signs for atheists, so it might be understood in a positive sense, as trying subtly to unite the public.

(05-10-2012 01:14 PM)Vosur Wrote: You don't even remember the previous page of this thread?

You mean this? Yeah, now I remember. I simply needed to google up a set of such images. But the Google images link was kinda long and I didn't know if it worked properly or it's generated just once, so I linked instead the website where the paintings were. AFAIK, the paintings are genuine, they weren't faked by the new agey people on that website. They just put them together conveniently to illustrate my point. I didn't realize it would be a problem for you.

I'm sorry dude, I've been under a lot of stress lately and there's more to come. I'm in for a huge gamble with my life. I wagered years of study and lifetime savings to move to a capital city and get on a school that offered to reassume my 3-year Specialist Diploma studies for a single year and let me earn a Bachelor degree in the same area of study. But there were some catches they did not tell me ahead, like that C-graded exams will not be accepted (and I had more C's than I thought, me stoopid) and that every application for exams acceptance will cost me a hundred of crowns, so can tell goodbye to some thousands. It's a prestigious school and lots of famous people in it, so there are some moments of euphoria (seeing famous politicians), but also prolonged periods of hardly suppressed horror. And I really really need a bachelor degree, I want to study masters at least.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

(05-10-2012 05:51 PM)Luminon Wrote: Well, there was a period of experiences for about a year that were quite intense and bizarre, I must say. The only luck is, that there wasn't any fear or sexual stuff involved No drugs, no alcohol, no meds, no life problems, nothing. Just me being a witness of some weird weird shit, many times actually.
Nothing directly involving space people, only confirming that their existence is principially possible. Plus of course my quite recent watchings of strange flying objects in the sky, without any obvious means of propulsion or flight. As far as I'm concerned, the ET story fits on my observations very well, so I keep it in mind and take it seriously. But nothing is set in stone.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. You saw "weird shit" for which you have no explanation and it causes you to conclude that aliens (possibly) exist. This has absolutely nothing to do with critical thinking and the scientific method.

(05-10-2012 05:51 PM)Luminon Wrote: Yep. It's Benjamin Creme who writes and publishes in his magazine much materials on this topic, regularly for years. (besides political and economic stuff, that's the other half of all his message)

Basically, the story is that back in 2009 or 2010 Creme announced, that this great big glowing star-like UFO would appear in January or so, showing itself on the sky. This parade is a symbolic gesture, meant to inspire people into an attitude of wonder and expectance of great things to come, equivalent to the mythical Star of Betlehem. Looks like the positive attitude of masses is an important factor for him. Specially the poor religious world majority, we cynical westerners don't react that much.
The interesting thing is, from that moment there started videos on Youtube popping up, people filming this unusual object that was neither Venus nor Jupiter. An object that changed colors and shape, moved around, up and down and so on. The typical diamond or disc shape may be seen on many videos, photographs and even captured the attention of media.
Similarly, there started appearing the things that resemble a rocket either gone spinning into a spiral, or flying across the sky with a really broad plume. The first two were marked as a Russian missile and Australian rocket, but IIRC since then there were about six more of these all around the world, without any explanation.
Well, and this year I've been seeing about four of these silvery cigar tubes with no contrails nor wings.
We live in very interesting times, I must say. Signs in the sky, signs on the ground, it looks like someone's trying to appeal to the religious public by replicating their prophecies, that's my opinion. But it's about all religions at the same time plus a few signs for atheists, so it might be understood in a positive sense, as trying subtly to unite the public.

Everytime you put up a source I have to step back from the computer and calm down for a bit. No offense, but it's incomprehensible to me how you can be so susceptible to believe dubious and obviously biased sources which are, on top of that, full of woo. Of course you can feel free to do whatever you want, but I'm not going to bother with this nonsense anymore. It's tiresome and disappointing to see that you haven't made any progress.

(05-10-2012 05:51 PM)Luminon Wrote: I'm sorry dude, I've been under a lot of stress lately and there's more to come. I'm in for a huge gamble with my life. I wagered years of study and lifetime savings to move to a capital city and get on a school that offered to reassume my 3-year Specialist Diploma studies for a single year and let me earn a Bachelor degree in the same area of study. But there were some catches they did not tell me ahead, like that C-graded exams will not be accepted (and I had more C's than I thought, me stoopid) and that every application for exams acceptance will cost me a hundred of crowns, so can tell goodbye to some thousands. It's a prestigious school and lots of famous people in it, so there are some moments of euphoria (seeing famous politicians), but also prolonged periods of hardly suppressed horror. And I really really need a bachelor degree, I want to study masters at least.

I understand, settling issues in your life should have the highest priority. Good luck.

RE: Do you think that aliens would bother to come to a highly superstitious planet?

(28-06-2012 10:26 AM)LabMonster13 Wrote: On the off chance that there is
intelligent life out there somewhere; do you think that they would
want to have anything to do with such a superstitious life form? In
my personal opinion I think that any advanced lifeforms curious about
this planet, wouldn't bother with it until life on this planet
learned to move beyond superstitions. This is an idea I have been
toying with and trying to get into a script. I would like to know
what the people on this part of the interweb think. Thank you.

Hi, good question, I often think about questions like that.

I want to give ya an opinion on how I think aliens should be viewed.

If they exist (and I believe its very possible) I think the best way we should look at them is to not humanize them. I say this because I view all sentient life as being comprised of different kinds of animals, humans and aliens included.

So, what i am trying to say is that aliens would be a different kind, albeit, intelligent animal. They may be as different from us as we are as different from our family pet.

When we look at other animals, we don't see any superstitions, religious beliefs, or anything like that. I think that if an alien were to look at us, they may not see nor understand things like religious beliefs or superstitions because they would simply not be human, and wouldn't possess our human qualities.

Just my thoughts.

How can anyone become an atheist when we are all born with no beliefs in the first place? We are atheists because we were born this way.